The challenge
Every day, millions of Nigerians receive claims they cannot easily check. A voice note says a public figure has died. A screenshot announces a new government portal. A video from another country is re-shared as if it happened down the street. By the time a newsroom publishes a fact-check, the message has already reached family groups, markets, churches and mosques, and the damage is done.
The problem is not that the truth is unavailable. It is scattered: in official statements, in trusted reporting, in fact-checks published months ago, in records most people never see. Finding it, weighing it and explaining it takes a trained journalist time that the average reader does not have.
Misinformation wins the race because checking is slow. We set out to make checking fast, without making it careless.
Speed alone is not the answer. A tool that answers quickly but guesses, or that sounds confident without showing its evidence, only adds to the noise. Any answer worth trusting has to show where it came from.
The solution News Intelligence brings
News Intelligence is an evidence-driven research and verification assistant, built by the team behind PIJAlance Magazine. You paste a claim exactly as you saw it. Within moments, it searches the open web, recent news, social media, official sources, Nigeria's fact-checking record and the PIJAlance archive, weighs every source it finds, and returns a clear verdict with the links behind it.
Evidence first
No verdict is ever drawn from the AI's own memory. Every factual point must be tied to a source you can open and read yourself.
Honest about uncertainty
When the evidence is thin, it says "unverifiable" instead of guessing. Not knowing yet is not the same as false.
Checked twice
A second, independent AI reviews every answer without seeing the first one's verdict. If they disagree, a human editor decides.
Editors for sensitive claims
Claims about deaths, sexual assault and elections go to a PIJAlance editor unless an official source has already settled them.
Every answer carries a clear note saying whether it was produced by AI or approved by a human editor. Every settled claim gets a shareable fact-check card, so the correction can travel as far as the rumour did.
Who it is for
- Anyone about to share something. Check it first, in less than a minute.
- Journalists and editors who need a fast first pass on a claim, with sources laid out for further reporting.
- Researchers, NGOs and civil society groups tracking what is circulating and what is true.
Where we are going
News Intelligence is in testing. Today it checks written claims on the web. Next come images and documents, a WhatsApp service, and deeper research tools: asking a question of a budget or a public record and getting a justified, sourced answer. The principle stays the same at every step: show the evidence, or don't make the claim.
Seen something you're not sure about?Check it before you share it. It takes less than a minute.
Check a claim